ELA Practice #4

This eleven-part series provides high school teachers with strategies for teaching writing for different purposes and audiences while gleaning tips and techniques from professional writers.

This online learning module helps define feedback and revision. It also provides teachers with strategies to support students into effective peer feedback, as well as resources to support effective formative feedback on writing.

C3WP is an intensive professional development program that provides teachers with instructional resources and formative assessment tools for the teaching of evidence-based argument writing. Resources are available on the site regardless of whether teachers engage in professional learning.

This site provides a comprehensive set of articles and essays that may serve as mentor texts for student writing.

This resource provides more than 70 places for adolescents to publish their writing and art.

This flexible, seven-unit program is based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and informational essays.

This eight-part series provides middle school teachers with strategies for teaching multiple genres, guiding students in peer reviewing and revising, and more.

In this article, author Joelle Pederson explores the connection between types of teacher feedback on student writing and the subsequent revisions students choose to make.

In this blog, author Jennifer Fletcher provides insights on supporting students in developing rhetorical thinking. Resources are also provided.

This free site provides educators and students with prompts, competitions, and opportunities for writing for authentic audiences, including options for students to submit writing publicly or to teacher-created private class publications.

In Teaching Adolescent Writers, Kelly Gallagher shows how students can be taught to write effectively. He illustrates classroom-tested strategies that guide teachers in improving secondary students' writing skills.

RAFT assignments encourage students to uncover their own voices and formats for presenting their ideas about content information they are studying. Students learn to respond to writing prompts that require them to think about various perspectives: Role of the Writer, Audience, Format, and Topic. 

Word Generation emphasizes 21st century learning goals, such as using academic language, developing an argument, reasoning analytically, reading to find evidence, reviewing data, discussing various perspectives, engaging in debate, and expressing well-reasoned positions in writing. Free sign-up required to access materials.

In Writing Rhetorically: Fostering Responsive Thinkers and Communicators, author Jennifer Fletcher aims to cultivate independent learners through rhetorical thinking. She provides teachers with strategies and frameworks for writing instruction that can be applied across multiple subjects and lesson plans. Students learn to discover their own questions, design their own inquiry process, develop their own positions and purposes, make their own choices about content and form, and contribute to conversations that matter to them.

This practice guide presents three evidence-based recommendations for helping students in grades 6–12 develop effective writing skills. Each recommendation includes specific, actionable guidance for educators on implementing practices in their classrooms. The guide also summarizes and rates the evidence supporting each recommendation, describes examples to use in class, and offers the panel’s advice on how to overcome potential implementation obstacles. This guide is geared towards administrators and teachers in all disciplines who want to help improve their students’ writing.